Friday, June 28, 2002

Sampling
It’s been said that a characteristic irony of this information age in which we live is that the more information we have the less informed we seem to be. For indeed, it would seem that the presence of such vast and easily-accessible measures of information would provide us with the data from which we could become both informed and knowledgeable, that is, able to make sensible and defensible opinions based on up-to-the-minute facts and figures. But hidden in the process of sifting all of this apparently indispensible information is a moment of digital error whose “lossyness” substitutes probability for truth. And without that grand narrative of truth, who’s to say what information truly means?
Data collection involves sampling, and sampling, as we all know, is only a snapshot at best and a horrible excuse for headlines at worst. Ordinary, everday citizens—the subjects of all of this information—do not think in ones and zeroes, but rather in the ambiguous murk that lies at the edge of culture’s river of opinion and (static and noise of our culture’s endless electric chat and feedback). But for statisticians and observers, pundits and analysts, information comes in the form of recognizable patterns. Patterns formed by the informed, curves drawn between points in a field of remarks. In many cases, of course, these patterns only resemble what the observers originally expected to find. But in all cases, they were rendered from data points that in themselves are only a snapshot of human opinion.
Quantization error is the lossy process of digization, also sampling, known to audiophiles as the bane of digital sound: the approximation of an original sound wave through the digital (binary) accuracy required of digital media. A point on the original wave, as it’s sampled, must be shifted to make it a number. While that number can be relatively large, the “last bit” still only has two existential opportunities: one or zero. In every digital sample, there is an error, introduced at birth, and carried by the last bit. To some (analog) audiophiles, what’s lost is the subtlety of truth. To get mystical about it, the part or remainder that cannot be forced through the digital gate (one or zero).
The very same process is involved in the production of information. Data points involve one and zero, yes or no, either/or decisions. These representations, while admittedly crude, are hoped, through the sheer volume of data collected and the error correction techniques applied to samples, to result in a picture of accuracy and truth. When in actuality, information ways as much about itself as it does about what it represents. And it cannot speak. It cannot answer its questioners, but offer only hidden (or sometimes obvious) patterns and curves.
What makes truth, and what makes information uninformative, is the ambiguity left in the original statement or claim that permits testing through conversation and interaction. It’s in the resolution of ambiguity through the interactions required of social reproduction that we constitute the force truth. Information has no force.

Tuesday, June 25, 2002

Record
There’s more than just a hint of irony in the fact that at the time when we have less quality time being present with ourselves and with others, we have more recording and archiving media available to us than ever before. The penetration of recording into daily life continues, driven perhaps by our insatiable need to rescue the ever-receding present from disappearing entirely. (Just as we continue to spend ever greater amounts of time and money on simulations of a reality that recedes similarly from the terrain of our experience.) There are two kinds of recordings. First-order recordings, which are in effect archives of a lived experience or event; and second-order recordings, which are essentially copies of existing recordings. Both kinds of recording refer back to an original event, performance, moment, or experience. In other words, all recordings are temporal productions. Anything else would be a copy, or an archive. The term recording implies temporality.
We record because memory is temporally structured and experienced. We both create or capture memories and relive them in lived time. Which means that we experience memory in present time. Recordings are hoped to permit us access to the present that in its fleeting unfolding has become past and is thus irretrievable. Do we record only to create and possess a permanent monument to the events of a present? Does recording function as a stand-in for narrative memory; a representation hoped to be as real and accurate as possible a reproduction of the way something was? A document, in other words? Most of the objects we create and consume are stateless and always present—that is, they carry no affiliation to a particular time or to any individual’s particular time; they are simply here and now. However, we seem to have a special affection for products that re-instantiate past times or recorded events. The entertainment and media worlds sell experiences: others’ for the most part but also our own. When we purchase a recording we’re not interested in having the experience of another person, however. We’re interested in being put into a rhythm unwound through the recording: whether it’s a film or an album.
Recordings are synchronous experiences. They are pre-recorded, but not experienced outside of time. To listen to or watch something that’s been recorded is to get in synch with the recording. It is a modification on present time: a re-presentation. We have special demands of these experiences. We might want to be lifted out of our immediate surroundings and present circumstances, as with a film. Or we might want to enhance, color, or augment our present circumstances (music for moods and ambiance). Here the impulse is not to document a fleeting present, but to double it up with an extra. There are tales of the nonplussed reactions among tribal peoples of their first audio recordings. Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo fails in his endeavor to bring real live opera to the Amazon; he succeeds however in its simulation. An exquisite meeting of cultures in the scene of a record player hoisted on the mechanics of European (steam) power, blaring Caruso’s 1902 recording of Italian opera: the first successful commercial vocal recording. Tribal people, we are told, did not recognize the voices within the recording as archived and real moments. Tribal people live their parallel realities through the imaginary. We, on the other hand, can live multiple realities at the same time.
What is present in a recording? What kind of present is it that comes out through a recording? Recordings are so good now, and have been since the camera, that we dare not question its accuracy. Photographic hoaxes and digital treatments notwithstanding, we believe what we see. And what we hear. To an extent we now employ surveillance as a means of documenting the mundane just in case something extra-ordinary occur. We live in a vast exteriorized or reverse panopticon. Hidden cameras and microphones capturing our every move, but from nodes in networks rather than from an architectural center. Recordings are good enough to stand in for the real. It is not through semiotic equivalency that simulation takes over the real. It is through temporal equivalency: our ability to live a representation in synchronous or real time and to attribute to the recording an authenticity that the primitve mind heard only as a disembodied mumbling. Presence, the present, are transformed.
Memory, then, is changed. For as long as it’s possible to believe and to trust a recording, it must certainly be possible to experience a second order reality. Things are real, experiences are valid, with which we have no direct experience. A kind of hyperreality, to borrow from Baudrillard. But not one that is founded on simulation and semiotic modelling (likenesses and appearances). Rather, a hyperrality grounded in pragmatics: not only indirect discourse, but indirect experience, is valid, is true. Our faith in the validity of these second-order experiences or recordings is in part what mobilizes their proliferation. We live in an economy that thrives on the serial reproduction of events and artifacts nobody can recall having experienced. We speak words first uttered by lord only knows who. We see things our eyes weren’t looking for in the first place….
Foucault once said that it’s thanks if it weren’t for forgetting the act of remembering would lose its significance. What’s it called when you’ve forgotten something you didn’t experience in the first place? The inverse of Coupland’s comment on nostalgia felt by kids who weren’t there for the experience in the first place? Can anybody tell anymore between the real and the reproduced? Perhaps if we last long enough we wont have to bother saving our bodies for the future; we’ll go the grave with an archive on disk.
It’s getting dark in here; could somebody turn the lights up please?

Monday, June 17, 2002

this response from Daniel to the list of media questions had me feeling good all morning...

Adrian:
I've just looked at a short film called "Valet Chronicles" at www.neighborhoodfilms.com, set at Caffe Trieste. Nothing special, you understand, and good for that very reason. I'm trying to just take this simple little filmic slick of life (work, stress, caffeen and wine; taste and smell) and run your questions through it laterally, transversally, up down and sideways and it dawns on me that this is a nice sieve through which to put a smallish instance of media, to see what sort of liquid thought emerges and what sort of particles get caught in the sieve... The expanse of your questions is like a football terrain in the elysian fields or a 3 dimensional startrek chess game or an endoscopic anthroscopic journey. Heidegger asked "was its die frage?" You have proliferated questions unto encyclopedism and underneath them their molecular unconscious is murmuring the question of the question... If media are to be interrogated, can they play the game of the confessional, and if so in their language or ours? Basically, can they answer or are they mute victims of interrogation? Then another thought floats to the surface, wondering about the possible geologic settling of these questions - where do they find their resting place in relation to each other? Quickly in time, i see that there is in this little film - already undone by becoming an example of something, even if a rich process - aspects of faciality, framing, addressing, constraints of social practice, civil inattention, user forgiveness, limited audience, amplification (of milk), and certainly affective capacity. Little bits of meaning begin to glom together, and yes then the 3rd place night surfer is tired now... You see, your initiative is so worthy of response it could be overwhelming so i had to scribble something here before too large a lapse dance slid into the booth.
Above all, thank you.
Daniel

Thursday, June 13, 2002

I'm posting the list of questions that have guided the second half of my book project, which looks at mediated commuication issues in detail. You can find a rather unpolished list of these questions here.

Wednesday, June 12, 2002

Is the phone on the seatback in an airplane a mobile phone? How is it possible that so much was spent to install those things without somebody suggesting that people wouldn’t feel comfortable using them. When was the last time you saw one in use? When was the last time you saw two people inside a telephone booth? Proximities matter. Being on the phone puts you in a conversational space that creates its own version of shared space, even though the person at the other end of the phone is physically absent. And any situation that creates an eavesdropping situation for others will create enough potential discomfort that most of us will seek out a more private space from which to make our calls.

Tuesday, June 11, 2002

I found a 12 point list about online community that I thought might be worth commenting on. Mostly as an exercise for myself. I'm at that stage in my thinking that I need to turn some of it outwards to the world. Engage in how professionals already approach the industry. And find my place in it...

"1. Purpose Community performs a necessary and useful function for members." http://www.customer-community.com/studies.html

What makes interaction useful takes time and iteration to develop. Because the medium is so thin, the challenge in many communities is to expose new members to interactions that create that hook, the moment of “aha.” A direct one to one interaction is usually what does it, for that’s the kind the contains the highest quotient of curiosity as well as potential connection.


Friday, June 07, 2002

In transactional analytic terms, the stroke is the fundamental currency of human interaction. It’s a kind of meta message that subsists within interactions and which performs an act of acknowledgement, thus producing in participants a “stroke.” Transactional analysis views communication as a fundamental means by which individuals build up their sense of ontological security. Membership in the society of man in general, and recognition by a group in particular, provides the individual with a sense of well-being that grounds his or her identity in a web of belonging. And this web, according to the tenets of transactional analysis, is so important that communication is its vehicle.
To play on marshall mcluhan, one might attempt to differentiate between hot strokes and cold stokes. Using his distinction between hot and cold media, one would argue that a hot stroke has a high degree of participatory content; a cold one, a low degree. Hot strokes would obtain in co-present situations and vary in temperature depending on the intensity of activity (and spontaneity) measurable in the exchanges and interactions among participants. Cold strokes, on the other hand, would be those abstracted or formalized into language itself. Utterances, even those circulated separately from their utterers—as emails, text messages, etc.—create disembodied presence. The cold stroke then would be obtained from the presencing that pushes through language and symbolic (say, visual) systems, but is cold for its lack of real attention giving. Cold strokes belong to the sedimentation of human presence and activity in communicative systems (verbal, symbolic). Cold strokes provide that hint of generic presence; you’re somehow included without being spoken to. These kinds of strokes exist in language itself as a residue, if you will, of the stroke originally embedded in first person discourse. Indirect discourse provides an embedded form of recognition and belonging.
We mine the stock of cultural images and statements that surrounds us for cold strokes. Even the cold touch beats none at all. Our media culture has created a social autism; a vision of belonging that doesn’t look back.
Viral marketing attempts to leverage our natural tendency to share ideas with one another through communication. As a medium, we have discovered that email is a remarkably cheap and easy communication channel and distribution network. In our current obsession with biological metaphors, we call this viral marketing because the spread of a “meme” so closely resembles the spread of a virus from host organism to host organism. But are we not robbing ourselves of a deeper insight? Have we not misplaced this metaphor? Rampant and unfettered growth of biological forms egged forward by excessive sunlight and warming of the oceans is not in any way similar to the distribution and proliferation of ideas and meanings in the exercise of mental, gestural, and verbal faculties on the part of conversing human beings—in the context of reproducing a society (which occurs as a byproduct). People talk. Viruses infect. They are passed from host to host not through a process of communication, but through physical transmission. If we’re to understand how viral marketing works, we’re going to need a model of mediated human communication, not a metaphor obtained from bad science.

Thursday, June 06, 2002

Alan Cooper writes the following in his company's newsletter: "Although it is difficult to predict exactly what the other second-order effects of wireless technology will be, it is clear that widespread, high-speed, always-on, wireless connectivity will have enormous cultural impact in the near future. One area that interests me is the concept of "face." When you drive down the street, strangers can see what kind of car you drive, read your license plate, and view your bumper stickers. This is one "face" you display. When you hand a colleague a business card at a conference, this is another "face." We all have many "faces," but they are generally informal, and are rarely constructed digitally.

In the wireless future, you will be able to automatically share a lot of very rich information with others, some of them strangers, some colleagues, and some intimate friends. These will be your "faces." You will have to choose what information you want to give to these individuals. Do you want to offer up a resume, a blank wall, or an autobiography? Photographs of your family? Glimpses into your hobbies or interests? If you want, you could give a twenty-page, copiously illustrated bumper sticker to every person you meet."

Bad analogy. Faces are dynamic, expressive, and communicative. What Mr. Cooper describes here has as much faciality as a steak has life. No, less.
Digital artifacts, documents, files, and other forms of information have no face. They are tokens. Structured, interpretable, useful perhaps. But contextless and insubstantial... As soon as a "face" is removed from its wearer, and more importantly perhaps, from communication, it becomes a mask. I think that might be a better term here. For a mask neither changes expression to manifest inner feelings, nor to mirror perceived expressions. It's through face that we integrate in the company of others. Face is shared. Masks are worn, hung on the wall, and perhaps traded. Face wears belonging. Masks belong on a face.

If we are truly to understand the implications of second order effects of wireless and other communications technologies, we need to think about the substitution of mask for face, and of how the loss of face compromises our experience of communication.
The writer Marshall McLuhan, in comparing “city man” with “tribal man,” suggested that while nomadic tribes were nomadic physically, they were sedentary mentally. And that modern city dwellers, while physically sedentary (settled), are mentally nomadic and dynamic. The point is interesting, and while we can’t deduce from it a causal or necessary relation between physical nomadism/mental sedentarity and physical settlement/mental nomadism, the contrast is worth entertaining. McLuhan wants to draw a comparison between movement in the cultural and intellectual sense and movement in the physical and societal sense. Without having to examine the accuracy of his anthropology, it would seem that McLuhan’s comparison rests on a bad analogy. It rests only on a metaphorical comparison, in which two different kinds of movement are compared only through their use of the same term. For nomads were in fact sedentary when in motion. The nomadic tribe travels together, in a pack, preserving its integrity and identity with every passing step. It is a society on the move. While nomads may have moved great distances through spaces, they moved within them with relative stillness.
Our movements through and within a space show us that space does not precede movement, but follows from it. We enjoy freedom of movement within spaces. It is movement through spaces that is constrained. In and within a space, we are free to move as we wish. It’s where we show up or don’t show up that matters to us, not how we get ourselves there. Hence the durability of American car culture: it is the vehicle by which we express and exercise our freedom to move within. Our limiting lines, or borders, are drawn around our spaces such that they constrain our movement through them. Fixed homes and places of work hold us captive; county lines, state lines, and national borders fix us to the many levels of territory we occupy, though we occupy only one place at any given time. What concerns us is the line of escape that travels through a space; hence our obsession with chase scenes, road movies, manhunts and state lines.
The net’s ability to conduct the flow of seduction works because as a medium it has no mirrors. Where this produces solitude and isolation in the physical world, in the virtual it facilitates seduction. For what breaks seduction is not an encounter with the other, but an encounter with the self. It’s in the sudden and jarring shock or recognition that seduction falls apart. Those precious and tantalizing moments when we meet others online for play or seduction are protected by the absence of reflective surfaces—and enhanced by the empty and formless space into which we allow ourselves to fall.

Monday, June 03, 2002

The first in a series. The addict's question: which is the last?